Our responses to fiction produce a complicated set of problems.
First of all, what is included under the heading of representation or fiction would incorporate everything from literature to TV to big-screen film to virtual-reality games. The problem is not entirely that the story is fictional or that it is false, but that it is a re-presentation of a story—true or otherwise. Why do we pur-posely experience things—and enjoy these experiences—which we know are not real? This is generally known as the “paradox of fiction.” The paradox can be constructed as follows:
(1) We only respond emotively to things that we believe to be real,
(2) We do not believe fiction is real, and (3) We respond emotionally to fiction.2
To explain the first part of this, logically, it wouldn’t seem that I would have an emotional response to a story you told me, if I knew beforehand that it wasn’t true—for example, if you were to say, “What I am about to tell you isn’t true” and then continue by saying, “I have a good friend who was so distraught over a romantic relationship that she threw herself in front of a train.” Logically and practically there would be no reason for me to be concerned at all about your friend or for me to have any sort of emotional response to your story. But we do have emo-tional responses to ficemo-tional and false stories all the time.
All sorts of answers are often given as explanations as to why we do have these responses. Answers range from suggestions that there is a “willing suspension of disbelief” (first proposed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge) to claims that any sort of empathy for the characters can produce an emotional response in the viewer or reader.3 Since I do not find any of these convincing, what I would like to suggest is that the way we empathize with fictional characters has more to do with the way the story is told than any real distinction between a true reality and some other manufactured or simulated reality or that it has anything to do with a willing suspension of disbelief. Whether it is the set of The Truman Show, a virtual reality world, or the reality provided Neo in The Matrix, when the observer becomes emotionally involved, it is because of the story.
Part of the problem is that we don’t believe that what we are watching is true. This is the key component that makes this a paradox. At first, Neo did not believe that what he found after he took the red pill could be what was truly real until the parts
2 The paradox of fiction is a general category, two subcategories of which would be the paradox of tragedy (How can we derive aesthetic pleasure from tragedy?) and the paradox of horror (Why do we enjoy horror when it is pre-sented through representation?).
3Jerrold Levinson does an excellent job of explaining the competing theories.
See his “Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain,” in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, eds., Emotion and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 20–34.
of the story he was told began to make sense to him. Even then, for a long time, he continued to question different aspects of what this new reality had to provide. So what we believe about what is real and what isn’t determines how psychologically and emotionally connected we become to a particular story. A belief of one kind or another is not going to provide a sufficient par-adigm for us to talk of justified or genuine emotions when the technology has changed the nature of the fictions that we expe-rience to the degree that it has. The Blair Witch Project aside, we
“believe” when we are watching a movie that what is happen-ing isn’t “real,” isn’t really happenhappen-ing. But the technology, espe-cially with the technology provided by IMAX films, which have more of an effect on our senses than a traditional film, and even the award-winning special effects in The Matrix, seems to get us caught up in the film in ways that go well beyond our simple belief that what we are seeing isn’t really happening. The point doesn’t seem to be that we don’t believe what is happening is real, but rather that the way the story is told (and now the spe-cial effects which influence the realness of the way the story is told) seems to be more influential over how we respond to the story.
Some of the new fictional media even threaten to blur the line between the real and fictional worlds that we experience—
some of it may have even made that line irrelevant. That is, we have not come to any conclusions as to whether or not we are able, imaginatively, to enter into fictional spaces in the same way that Neo enters the Matrix. And as Neo is told repeatedly,
“you can’t be told what the Matrix is, you have to see it your-self.” Neo has to choose the red pill in order to experience this very different reality for himself. This is similar to the fact that I will never have the same experience or emotional response when someone tells me about a movie or a novel as when I see it or experience it for myself. Is it even possible that we, as viewers, could have the same sort of access to our fictional spaces that Neo had while he was in the desert of the real?
Kendall Walton suggests that we experience fictions psycholog-ically, in similar ways as children do physically when they play their games of make-believe.4 That would imply, however, that
4 See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
we really are able to enter into a fictional space in a way that is relevantly similar to the way Neo enters the reality that is the Matrix. Although we do not physically enter into another space, being able to explain the resulting emotional effects by saying that it is a cognitively similar experience would relieve us of the burden of explaining why we respond to things we believe not to be “real.” That is, if the experiences are cognitively similar, a
“belief in the reality of” or the clear distinction between “real”
and “unreal” becomes not just blurred but irrelevant.
Don’t misunderstand however. It is clear that we do not have to believe what is going on in the film in order to be affected by it. In fact, we cannot believe what is happening if we are to have an emotionally appropriate (aesthetic) response. This is especially true when it comes to tragedy or horror.5 Generally, we are not amused by others’ tragic lives nor do we derive plea-sure out of watching people chased, stalked, or murdered. But in the context of a fiction, we often enjoy these things. We can enjoy them, however, only if we do not believe they are hap-pening. We can enjoy watching Neo fighting Morpheus, after Neo has learned through a programmed computer simulation of a combination of martial arts, only if we know that neither of them is really being hurt. This goes even further with the kinds of special effects that The Matrix employs, since what the viewer sees is what it would be like if time slowed down or even stopped. Since we know that this can’t happen, or it at least isn’t part of our experience, we can still allow it to influence our response to the movie. (The bounds of these situations are also being stretched by the media with a new genre of voyeuristic television shows like Survivor, Real World, and Big Brother. We may even get to the point where we do want to know the pre-sentation is “real” in order to derive aesthetic pleasure out of it.)